Taming the Tigers

A frequent criticism lodged against many U.S. newspapers is that they discourage aggressive young reporters from doing tough exposes and offbeat features and waging anti-Establishment crusades. Eight years ago, Cleveland Plain Dealer Publisher Thomas Vail decided that his paper needed revitalizing. Over several years, he recruited nearly a score of new staffers who were nicknamed "the young tigers." He loosed them on the seamier side of Ohio's largest city, and the paper's investigative reporting blossomed. Beamed Vail: "Terrific, just terrific."

No more. Most of the original "tigers" have moved on to other jobs and they are not being replaced by others of similar temperament. "We're shifting gears," says Vail, "and hiring guys with a track record of seven, eight, nine years' experience." Vail, 46, and his executive editor, Thomas Guthrie, 61, simply soured on the kids. "We took on a wild lot of young reporters," Vail says. "Some of them wrote stories that were full of inaccuracies and made-up sources. They were fun, but they didn't want to do the nitty-gritty work it takes to be a good reporter." Adds Guthrie: "They had no loyalty. They wanted to be instant Lippmanns. Even their grammar was atrocious." A Scotsman, Guthrie scans two London papers every day "just so I can read some decent English."

Youngsters who have left--and some who remain--view the dispute as a matter of principle rather than grammar. In 1971 Reporter Joe Eszterhas was fired after writing an embarrassing satire for Evergreen Review on the Plain Dealer's handling of its scoop on the My Lai massacre photos. That caused ill will and became part of the continuing friction that defined itself in terms of both age and politics. Junior reporters began calling two older executives "Mad Dog" and "Snake," and were in turn referred to as "the Cong" and "the Revolutionaries." For a while management fretted over a rumor that reporters were planning to put LSD in the cafeteria water fountain.

Reflecting the turbulence, the paper has had four managing editors in less than three years. The current M.E. is Robert Burdock, 45. His predecessor, Wilson Hirschfeld, was fired after a stream of complaints from reporters that he was killing or slanting stories to protect friends in the city administration. Hirschfeld, a Christian Scientist, also tried to reduce the paper's medical coverage. Fraser Kent, a respected medical reporter, quit in disgust, for this and other reasons. There was also bitterness over management's appeal for police assistance when Newspaper Guild members picketed the paper during a strike last October. Since December alone, six reporters and editors have left. The reporting staff is down to 41 from a peak of 52 in 1968.

The young dissidents--and some older staffers too--feel that the infighting has hurt the paper's editorial quality. "We came to rely more and more on the wire services and the New York Times News Service," says a former staffer. "There wasn't time for journalism." In fact coverage of local affairs is less enterprising than it was a few years ago. The paper's competitive position, however, shows no sign of being damaged. The Plain Dealer remains Ohio's largest daily, with a circulation of 409,-000. Ad linage is increasing. As far as Vail is concerned, the troubles have ended. "I've got the best management team I've ever had," he says. "We're going to be better than ever."

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